Lush perennial plantings are highlighted against a high, curving hedge of clipped yew in the Sharon garden of Lynden Miller, who has designed more than 40 public gardens in New York City. Miller's garden is one of 28 featured in "Private Gardens of Connecticut," by Jane Garmey.

Lush perennial plantings are highlighted against a high, curving hedge of clipped yew in the Sharon garden of Lynden Miller, who has designed more than 40 public gardens in New York City. Miller's garden is one of 28 featured in "Private Gardens of Connecticut," by Jane Garmey.

Lynden Miller — who has designed more than 40 public gardens in New York City over the past 35 years, including the Central Park Conservatory Garden and Bryant Park at the New York Public Library — was an abstract landscape painter for many years.

"I loved being a painter," she said in an interview at the end of April, but she discovered in 1982 that using her artist's eye to make compositions of plants for people to enjoy — "painting with plants" — brings her a great deal more joy than being alone in the studio.

Miller, who will talk about her work on May 10 at an event sponsored by the Elizabeth Park Conservancy, is a passionate advocate for cultivating beautiful urban gardens.

"It's the response that every human being has to nature," she said. "When people see that the city cares about that, there's an unspoken message [from the city] that 'we did this for you and the people here.' It's a sanctuary for the soul of city dwellers."

Elizabeth Park Conservancy

Public garden designer Lynden B. Miller, author of "Parks, Plants, and People: Beautifying the Urban Landscape," will speak May 10 as part of the Elizabeth Park Conservancy's annual garden lecture series.

Miller made the shift from painter to garden designer in 1982, when the administrator of Central Park asked her to restore the Conservatory Garden in the park's northern end in East Harlem, a depressed section of the city.

Miller said she was warned that "poor people would just trash it." That didn't happen; the garden is a flowering oasis. "When people perceive that they are being taken care of, they tend to take care of things in return."

Shortly after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Miller heard from a bulb producer in the Netherlands who lamented, "I wish there was something I could do." Well, there was. Miller asked if he had any spare bulbs, and before long he had sent her half a million daffodil bulbs for her Daffodil Project, and so had the city of Rotterdam. She enlisted thousands of volunteers — many grieving, many who had never planted anything ever before — to plant daffodils all over the city. The following spring,the yellow daffodils in bloom raised people's spirits and offered a beautiful living memorial to those who died. Sixteen years later, she said, the Daffodil Project continues and has now planted more than 6 million bulbs.

"It's been a dream come true, a tool for community activism, people getting together. And people now realize how important their parks are."

Public gardens in urban spaces also provide many economic benefits, Miller said — improving neighborhoods, raising property values, cleaning the air and giving people the idea that "maybe I can do that too, in my window box, in my back yard."

Diane Bondareff /Associated Press

The Conservatory Garden in New York’s landmark Central Park is just one of the more than 40 public gardens in the city Lynden Miller has designed over the past 35 years.

The Conservatory Garden in New York’s landmark Central Park is just one of the more than 40 public gardens in the city Lynden Miller has designed over the past 35 years.

(Diane Bondareff /Associated Press)

Miller's primary focus as a designer, as a teacher at New York University and in her work at the New York Botanical Garden and Columbia University is on the elements of successful public open space; she details these themes in her landmark book, "Parks, Plants, and People: Beautifying the Urban Landscape," which won the American Horticultural Society National Book Award in 2010.

But many of her insights about gardening in parks apply equally to home gardeners.

She contends, for example, that a successful garden looks good in every season. She urges people to plant oakleaf hydrangea, "a native plant that is beautiful in all four seasons — it grows in the shade, it grows in the sun, and it turns red in the fall."

Many gardeners, she said, put too much emphasis on annuals — which cost time and money "to buy, plant, water, deadhead, pull out and then throw out."

They're "not worth the rent," she said. "It's silly, a waste of energy. Don't get seduced by color. The best gardens are based on texture, line, foliage."

She said she has learned to look around her own garden in Sharon to notice what's doing really well — and then "double and triple it."

"I used to feel that the proportion [in a garden design] should be one-third shrubs and two-thirds perennials, but now I think it's the other way around."

Tickets to Lynden Miller's lecture, book-signing and the preceding luncheon on May 10 at the Hartford Golf Club are $45, available through elizabethparkct.org.